


New Hero, Now Here

by lost_spook



Category: Doctor Who (2005), Fire and Hemlock - Diana Wynne Jones
Genre: Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-14
Updated: 2012-06-14
Packaged: 2017-11-07 17:41:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,326
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/433717
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lost_spook/pseuds/lost_spook
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Polly meets another hero.</p>
            </blockquote>





	New Hero, Now Here

There was something else that had happened that year, another thing she had forgotten, although it seemed oddly disconnected to everything else in that hidden set of memories. Polly had still been angry at the time, all through the empty summer and the weeks back at school. She’d been trying to reread Tolkien as a private act of rebellion, yet found herself with _The Golden Bough_ again, unsure exactly where’d she’d left it this time, and not having much more patience with it than she had with the book of fairy tales.

It had been around then that there had been another stranger at Hunsdon House. She had been walking along the path towards it, not exactly meaning to, but finding herself there anyway. Nearing it, the guilty memory of the Fire and Hemlock picture and her stolen photograph played on her mind again, and she stopped short of the house. 

She couldn’t walk back the other way; that would be too obvious, so, with a careless shake of her fine hair, she crossed to the opposite side of the street and headed onwards as if she wasn’t aware of its presence - dark and shuttered even in the sunlight. She glanced, though, surreptitiously, remembering that there was an all too ordinary reason to avoid it. She didn’t want to meet Seb again, either.

There was somebody there now, and for one moment, catching the silhouette of the tall man out of the corner of her eye, she had thought it was _him_. Her first reaction was to be careful to pretend that she hadn’t noticed, and she continued walking on until she frowned, because Mr Lynn couldn’t possibly be here standing outside Hunsdon House when she knew he was on the other side of the world. 

Polly turned around.

*

“Are you a thief, casing the joint?” asked a voice from the side of him suddenly. “You might want to try being a bit less obvious.”

The Doctor paused and studied the girl standing in front of him: slight, with white-blonde hair and quite young. Not as young as Amelia Pond on their first meeting, but definitely not as old as she’d been on their second. “You’re an expert, then?”

She smiled, but only side-stepped that question. “Pretend you’re not looking at it – keep on walking.”

“I was looking because there’s something very odd about that house - and I’m not a thief. Well, not most of the time. Not unless there’s a very good reason. Well, a reason, anyway. What I _am_ is an expert on odd. Especially temporally odd. Although I’d say something about it isn’t even in our reality, so maybe it’s not even exactly temporal – not sure what it is, but I ought to find out.”

“Nowhere,” she murmured under her breath. “This is Now Here, and that’s Nowhere.”

The Doctor hurried on down the road. “And something tells me you know something about it, which is odd in itself, because you don’t look odd. Not odd enough to be part of that – whatever it is. What are you?”

The girl lifted her head and gave him an appraising look, and then said, “I’m an assistant hero.”

*

It was another example of her gift of knowing things. She didn’t understand it then, but it had clearly been the right thing to say. The stranger took it in his stride; as if he was used to talking about heroes and playing games of pretend, and wouldn’t be at all surprised to find a giant in the supermarket or a hardware shop that shouldn’t exist. He looked exactly the sort of person to have read all of the books she had lying about her room.

“Nice to meet you, then,” was what he said. “Assistant heroes are my very favourite sort of people. I usually have one about somewhere. In fact, I’ve mislaid two right now, and I should be off finding them before they get into trouble-”

Polly smiled back, and put her hand on his arm. She told him about the yellow horse, and about the monster in Bristol. She explained slodging, and how many places she had broken into in the course of it, and he grinned and he said it was something he did quite often, but not usually for a dare (well, except when it was). Then she closed her eyes, hoping that had been enough, and, thinking about Now Here and Nowhere, the Obah Cypt and her stolen photographs and the lurking form of Hunsdon House, she said, “I’m in training to be a hero for a reason.”

“Of course you are,” he’d said, as if he had the same heroic trait of knowing things. “And once you’ve blagged your way into the Town Hall for the third time, you get to fight a dragon.”

Or maybe _not_ , thought Polly, disappointed. Suddenly her heart was in her mouth. For all she’d thought, all her vague and woolly inability to make herself believe what was happening, there was still Laurel and Mr Leroy. This man was strange enough that he might be able to do something about them, but if he went charging in – yes, another hero, on another horse (probably translated into a vehicle every bit as unlikely as Tom’s yellow car) – to challenge the darkness here and defeat Laurel while she still seemed to own Tom Lynn, then it might destroy Tom, too. Polly chewed a stray end of hair, because it did seem grandiose to stand in the every day now-here streets of Middleton and talk about heroes and whatever Laurel really was and matters of life and death. _Being a hero_ , she reminded herself, _means learning to ignore how embarrassed you feel._

“You were slodging and you stumbled into that place?” the Doctor tried again, squinting at her, trying to read her. He _didn’t_ know things, she thought, looking at him. He just knew so many things, it seemed as if he did, but that wasn’t the same. “And you saw – what did you see?”

Polly said, “It wasn’t exactly like that. You should find your friends and leave That House alone.” She sounded like Granny, she thought.

“I should? Should I? Why?”

“It’s a matter of life and death,” said Polly, summoning up her haughtiest manner in the hope that it would work – or if it didn’t, it would cause him to think that she was joking and that she didn’t really believe in such things in this day and age. “I have to rescue someone, and I don’t think you _could_. It isn’t time. I think you might kill them if you tried now.”

He stopped and looked at her for a long moment – it seemed a very long moment – but he didn’t laugh, and she found she almost wished he had. She didn’t want it to be real. 

“And you said you have people to rescue, too,” she added, when he didn’t argue with her, or tell her she had a very active imagination. “Can I help?”

“You might be able to,” he said, straightening up. “I left them at a fish and chip shop and now I can’t see it anywhere. I’ve been wandering around for an hour – got a bit distracted.”

Polly pointed. “Down there, and left at the end.”

“You’re laughing at me.”

She shook her head. “I was only thinking that you're probably an heroic driver, too.”

“You know, I might be.”

“You nearly crash a lot, but you never get injured,” she said, meeting his gaze solemnly, as if fortune-telling. “I thought as much.”

The Doctor looked back at her, hard. She thought for a minute he was going to suddenly dismiss all her childish nonsense, as the adults usually did, or tell her that she really was a bit young to be rescuing someone, but he said: “What’s your name?”

“Hero,” said Polly. 

“Hero?”

“Polly Whittacker, really,” she said, raising her head. “But you can call me Hero.”


End file.
